Prehistoric Korea
It nonetheless constitutes the greatest segment of the Korean past and is the major object of study in the disciplines of archaeology, geology, and palaeontology.
[1][citation needed] The Yeoncheon System corresponds to the Precambrian and is distributed around Seoul extending out to Yeoncheon-gun in a northeasterly direction.
The Korean Peninsula had an active geological prehistory through the Mesozoic, when many mountain ranges were formed, and slowly became more stable in the Cenozoic.
Major Mesozoic formations include the Gyeongsang Supergroup, a series of geological episodes in which biotite granites, shales, sandstones, conglomerates andesite, basalt, rhyolite, and tuff that were laid down over most of present-day Gyeongsang-do Province.
The period of 8000 to 3500 BC corresponds to the Mesolithic cultural stage, dominated by hunting and gathering of both terrestrial and marine resources.
[4] The origins of this period are an open question but the antiquity of hominid occupation in Korea may date to as early as 500,000 BC.
In Seokjang-ri and in other riverine sites, stone tools were found with definite traces of Palaeolithic tradition, made of fine-grain rocks such as quartzite, porphyry, obsidian, chert,[citation needed] and felsite manifest Acheulian, Mousteroid, and Levalloisian characteristics.
Jeulmun pottery bears basic design and form similarities to that of the Russian Maritime Province, Mongolia, the Amur and Sungari River basins of Manchuria, the Baiyue of southeastern China and the Jōmon culture in Japan.
[8] The people of the Jeulmun practiced a broad spectrum economy of hunting, gathering, foraging, and small-scale cultivation of wild plants.
People in southern Korea adopted intensive dry-field and paddy-field agriculture with a multitude of crops in the Early Mumun Period (1500–850 BC).
The Mumun is the first time that villages rose, became large, and then fell: some important examples include Songgung-ni, Daepyeong, and Igeum-dong.
The most well-known version of the founding legend that relates the origins of the Korean ethnicity explains that a mythical "first emperor", Dangun, was born from the child of the creator deity's son and his union with a female bear in human form.
